This is an old one, from 2011 sometime. I was trying to illustrate a concept to someone.

During quiet moments in work I often doodle. This is my favourite of today's posts. A composite of two pages.

A friend asked me to do something to illustrate the effects of stress on a person. Nailed it, qapla!

I have a first rate cousin, I did this on a piece of his wood. Its a bit blurry cos I wasn't able to bend my scanner to fit it. If you have a problem with that I suggest you take it up with the laws of physics. I hadn't finished it but then decided it was finished for the time being. I have some other stuff nearly done, considered uploading it today but both pieces are too good not to finish so aren't ready for the public yet. I'm going to plough ahead with them when I get more free time and inspiration.

_For anybody who's ever been upset. The main theme of the work is concerned with the type of heavy handed, imperfect self-protection that people often surround themselves with. On the inside is the real person, the mind and heart, protected but trapped. Around that are barriers, to keep people away. The outer layer is a mask used to blend in.

The eye represents the mind. It can do its job fairly well from behind its barriers. The heart is not doing so well, supported badly hanging from some of its veins and arteries, it needs to be mounted much more securely but that was the best I could do with it after the last time it fell on the floor and broke. The glass was built by me for my own protection. It is featureless and transparent so that nobody, including myself can see it and it would be more difficult for me to remove. The wooden surround and the glass are on the outside, protecting the fragile core. Those are the only parts of me that people can see readily. I have consciously designed it this way.

The vines are the tracks of time or experience. The two large flowers are there to keep my sunny side out, they're fakes but they help discourage people from asking me if I am ok and in turn causing me to have to deal with a load of disharmonic feelings.

The cloud that can hang over anybody's head got trapped in there when I built the hourglass, it can grow to fill the whole thing if it gets angry and causes my eye to cry salty tears. The corrosive liquid would fall on my heart if it weren't for my girders, badly rusted from the tears. The first one is of no use anymore and the second is just about to let go completely. They only fit in there because the original complete hourglass broke the first time it was used and now traps the heart in a prison of sharp glass where it can't beat too hard or it will be cut and spill its blood.

This is a snapshot of a mental and emotional state of crisis. I wanted to create a sense of panic, drama and the feeling of being at the end of one's wits. And don't worry about me, I have long since smashed the glass and thrown the girders away. My heart can beat strongly again, my mind has nothing to hem it in. If I can do it you can too.

The work is on A2 good quality paper and done 100% in ordinary pencil from H to 5B. I began by measuring everything and getting the geometry right, then outlined as much as possible before progressing to the shading. I used paintbrushes and a chamois leather to smooth the graphite as much as possible in many places and used a 0.3mm pencil for the fine details. I was juggling the manual work with lots of thinking about the concept, the various details went in when they were ready, when they sat right with my soul and not before. To reproduce this this from start to finish would take me at least a month but with the cognitive work the whole process took more than a year.

_A signature piece and like a lot of my work its an abstract self portrait. Particularly my brain and heart. I never draw a brain without eyeballs for two reasons. They’re technically part of the brain and I think they’re cool.The hornets’ nest represents the rational multitasking side and the hamster represents my single minded creative side.I really wanted to draw a real looking human heart but decided it’d be too hard to get right. A clockwork one was the second option so I butchered an old printer to get some cogs to draw around.I have incorporated human style heart valves into this design. Its expanded from a drawing I did in an old notebook round the 2002 mark. I spent as much time erasing as I did laying stuff down to keep the white clean. You have to mind your tonal range when you’re working with pencil.

Some very nice people wrote some very nice things about it:

RosaCobosAre you sure do you want an artistically interpretation?You are speaking in symbols. And these are not on errand. They are displayed in a real “thoughtful manner”. Or intelectual manner if you wish. Artistically, I would say you take good care in obtaining a highly aesthetically done work. Perfect drawing, perfect mood, ambiance, careful proportions of the objects, looking for a symmetry that is going to affect the picture with a sense of equilibrium. The using of different techniques like perspective, shadings, palette of greys, meticulosity in the tiny objects of Life….a stounding sense of magic attraction toward the main object which is the tree, around whom, Life is running in cycles, either from the inside or from the outside. Then it comes out the “interpretation” from a symbolism, that is really inherent to the piece. The Tree…the Being.Sound, Straight, Exhuberant,sort of a tight pressed Being, against the background.Even you have created a perfect space softened by a blurring mist and two distant objects. For me…it is a bit suffocating.The Sun…whimsical character here….like a woman dressed as man, doing a strip-tease show.The Idea… metaphorical, is that feeling inside , of the Cosmic Father containing much of the feminine and that once in a while is stripped of his boastful manner of doing things, and trying to reach to the cool earth..It seems that is not the tree the one needed of the feeding , nurturing sun, but the sun needed of the fresh branching of the tree. To the point of letting his rays be falling like coquette petals of a sunflower. Calling thus, his attention.Spliting brain…not splitting at all. Just a harmonic consciousness of the brain division…very important in all the work.From there is the creativity of the artistic expression. Intelect is not duelling between the two sides, but profiting of their differences. The Action. Queer. The Essence’s action is coming from two points. To the right (which is your left really) Yang drive. The rigid and ancestral organization of a hive. The reason well administered, managed. They bees, thoughts, seem to be there free going. False. They work in a perfect machine organization. Nothing is out of the system.Left. The symbolism of the intuition, feminine, lunar, side. The hampster is trapped. In a sort of Wheel of Fortune, The feminine, lunar side is traying to advance to the future, but is dominated by inertia. And a humble bee is encouraging his coming out. She is a dissident….dissidency of our own thoughts and reasoning, sometimes is a great punch to our ego-centered jail of the intelect.And at last!!!The clockwork heart!. An extraodinary piece of art, that beleive me is the most melodramatic, or theatrical object of all the piece. It is a fake. Yes.. is it a protection.. an icon of your tender emotional sensibility. You prefer to show yourself like a methodic and sort of mechanical emotional being… in order to protect your demands. I this way…. the souls that may reach you, will not beleive that you are… let’s say.. “Easy”. Capted? Sometimes I express myself very Spanish like.Well… I knew this was going to be long. I have met your gallery andthis pic, thanks to mistertooth…and oh… I am really happy for his mail. I love your work and the reaction and opening of meaning that has meant for myself. Fantastic!Rosa

mistertroothok … ! Firstly – i’m totally blown away by this, and suddenly very flattered at the attention you pay my work..!I read tarot cards, and adore symbolism – to me this has the resonance of a tarot card, so i’m looking at it partly from that perspective…the sun is an expression of your full creative potential – the fully-realised self – the upper tree to me looks like a representation of the brain, with it’s left and right hemispheres joined in the middle, and connected to the trunk (spinal column) of the ‘self’ – reaching into the collective unconcious of the earth, and your heart, your core emotional self, at the point where they merge.The position of the wasp’s nest and the hamster, beneath the “brain”, to me suggests they exist in your own unconcious – your deeper issues and motivations.So what I’m seeing here is a a symbolic image of you at your creative peak – your higher creative self feeding directly into your mind – creating a ‘buzz’ – stirring up activity in your subconcious, and thereby engaging your heart energy, putting you in touch with your essential self ….There ya go … ?? Cheers mate. Love it.

_Ah, DZ 015. There’s one I haven’t seen in many a long year.No surprises there either, it was pulled in by a quirky set of DMA requests that happened by chance. Its been down there a long time, look at how filthy it is. It hasn’t been connected for ages judging by the damage and the muck in the I/O ports.I can’t even remember the last time I used something that could connect to it, my equipment has been through at least ten updates since I used gear like this. But it is chained to something, could be nothing or it could be something scary, we’ll see in time. There’s no telling what it actually does til I get it raised and on land, I can’t see anything below the waterline without going down there, and I’m not doing that.Now that I have it its time to open it and see what’s inside that I could use. While it was a bad day it was a period of rapid technological advancement and I may have forgotten something useful along the way. Here’s what happened, I overheard one of my housemates jilting someone down the phone. She was really nice about it but firm. It made me think “poor fella, this is Friday night, he was probably planning that all week.” And I remembered one time when I was young, inexperienced and on the receiving end of a jilting. Had a vision, commenced drawing, and here we are. The process I’ve tried to illustrate is mentioned here at one minute in and I’ll explain it like this;Words as sounds come into the ear, are translated into sensory information and fed to the brain. The brain must then reference the signals with a concept it has already stored to derive the meaning. This is the memory retrieval phase. The sensory input is represented by the blender which breaks down the info into the reference numbers of the memories needed to construct and the relevant ones are pulled in by a programmable electromagnet. One concept can often pull in thirty or forty memories, here I only have five. The sensory pathways are on an overlay with different perspective to the rest of the drawing. Anyone who is familiar with computer games will get this instantly.

_This one’s straight out of the sketchbook so its a bit rough and there are drawings on drawings. I really wanted to show it off though. I believe its conceptual virtue will see it through.Here’s the idea:I first got limited access to my subconscious leading from an agreement with my mind that it’d let me in there to try to fix some problems.What it didn’t tell me was I wouldn’t be allowed to remember very much of what I’d seen there. There was no arguing, I was very lucky to get the access I did. Any time I’d dream or have lucid waking half dream or just be deep in thought I could go there. My anonymous handler gave me a computer in a nice enough room to work in and I asked to be left alone.After a while I used some other bits and pieces to construct a device that could project an image of what I could see on the workstation onto the wall. It still needed to be patched into the main security network to make it “live,” I never had any problems there though and I’m still not sure how I got away with it. I reckon I was the beneficiary of some good natured member of the security staff who saw what I was trying to do and disregarded his or her orders for the greater good.I hid a large sheet of paper on my person on the way in one night and was able to draw over the projection and secrete the paper and have my escape with the precious data which I was then able to make into art. This then is one of the places I get my art from.My mind wasn’t too impressed when it found I’d been at the restricted media but but I told it to remember who was in charge and to shut up or I’d stick a pencil in it.